Rock Paper Scissors and variants

Rock Paper Scissors is a game where two players simultaneously pick one of the three things in the title. Rock beats Scissors, Scissors beats Paper, Paper beats Rock, and if both players pick the same thing they tie.  Rock Paper Scissors is important in game theory, because it is a toy model that helps understand a much broader class of games.

To understand the correct strategy in Rock Paper Scissors, we must understand the difference between pure strategies and mixed strategies. A pure strategy is deterministic, where a mixed strategy is random. There are only three possible pure strategies: pick Rock, pick Paper, and pick Scissors. There are infinitely many mixed strategies available, for example assigning 50% probability to Rock, 25% to Paper, and 25% to Scissors.

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Origami: Drawer box

Drawer box

Drawer Box, designed by Akiko Yamanashi

I got this drawer box from something called the Practical Origami Convention.  I didn’t actually attend the convention, but happened to access the models later, and picked this one out to fold.  I have to imagine that there are a bunch of origamists making “practical” designs like tiny chairs to sit on, and tiny tables to hold tiny flowers.  (I’m joking, I know that practical origami has a lot of emphasis on boxes and envelopes.)

I can’t remember how many sheets this needed, but it was over 10.  Each drawer is a separate sheet, with another sheet to be used as lining.  The cabinet box (I had to look up what this part of the drawer is called) is made of 4 pieces, or maybe more?

Now obviously there’s a lot of origami that stretches what you would think is possible with a single sheet.  But other designs are more sheet-maximalist, with multiple distinct units working together.  There’s some complexity in that; you need to make the sizes match, accounting for the thickness of the paper, and some units need to be firmly attached to each other.

Four reviews of musical sequels

In my family, I have a reputation for hating movies. To some extent this is humorous exaggeration, but it has been a noticeable pattern since my teenage years. What is true is that I do not go out of my way to watch many movies. I only watch a few per year, usually as part of a family outing. And the part of movies I enjoy the most is talking shit about them afterwards. When I have shared this trash talk online, it’s not always well-received, because people love their darlings, and my reasoning is not necessarily well-founded. But I also enjoy reading imdb reviews and laughing at all the weird reasons people like or dislike movies, so it’s only fair that you get to laugh at my weird reasons.

What I have here are a small collection of reviews of musical sequels. In all of these cases, I only saw the second movie, I did not see the first. You are welcome to think that this is the improper way to see them. But it seems like all the movie industry makes anymore is sequels (fact check: sequels are about 40% of the movie market). So isn’t this just the logical conclusion?

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Review: Revenge of the Phantom Press

Revenge of the Phantom Press is a novel by FTBlogger William Brinkmann. It is the sequel to The Rift, which I previously reviewed, although it may be read as a standalone.

To recap The Rift, it follows Tom Larsen, a young man in the skeptical community who goes full men’s rights activist after propositioning a woman in an elevator. It’s a fictionalized story about Elevatorgate and the feminist wars in the skeptical/atheist community. I recommend it if you have any sort of feeling about that topic.

In the Bolingbrook universe, not only is there a skeptical community, but also the paranormal is real. There are psychics, aliens, ghosts, the Illuminati, machine spirits, and more. Many of the leaders in the skeptical movement are participating in the coverup. By the end of the previous book, Tom Larsen has discovered the truth of the paranormal. It goes against his skeptical/humanist values to cover it up, so instead he leaves the skeptical movement to join the unbelievable-yet-true tabloid, The Bolingbrook Babbler. Most people, including his parents, think he went nuts.

At the start of the book, we learn that Tom isn’t very good at his job. He radiates mediocre white dude energy. He struggles to form contacts in the Department of Paranormal Activity, and can’t seem to capture a photo of the local lake monster.

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Link Roundup: March 2026

I wrote an article for The Asexual Agenda which may or may not interest readers, talking about umbrella terminology.

“I am Jesus Christ” and Other Games about Jews | Jacob Geller (video, 40 min) – Jacob diving through obscure games to find any Jewish games at all is actually so relatable.  I do the same for queer media.

Saw | Contrapoints (video, 1:36 hours) – Saw is a 2004 movie about people trapped in a game devised by a serial killer, forced to choose between death and ultra violent suffering.  There is no way I would ever enjoy such a thing myself (that is, a movie), but I appreciate this analysis of what other people might like about it.  Violence is really common in movies, but often it’s couched in terms of justice–violence against people who “deserved” it.  However, in Saw, the character who enacts violence in the name of justice is the villain.

What do we owe the insufferable? | Psychiatry on the margins – Some people with mental illness are challenging to deal with on a personal level.  We can suspend our moral judgment, but that also deprives them of moral agency, treating them like a patient rather than a person.  People with difficult personalities often need help, but even caretakers can find them exhausting, and they end up with lower quality of care.  There are no known solutions.

Heated Rivalry is the romance story I’ve been missing | Council of Geeks (video, 42 min) – This echoes some of the points in my review.  One of my persistent issues with the romance genre is the dilemma between internal and external sources of conflict.  Straight romances frequently have internal sources of conflict.  As a result I often think the relationships are bad, and the characters would be would be better off if they broke up!  M/M romances frequently have external sources of conflict, but this can make the relationship itself boringly perfect.  Heated Rivalry does it differently, the external conflict made internal.

That indie game money

If a game is on Steam, it’s possible for a public observer to estimate how much money it made. The thing to look at is the number of reviews. There’s a fairly predictable ratio between the number of sales to the number of Steam reviews, about 30:1. Then you can multiply by the game price (accounting for discounts). Subtract 30% for Steam’s cut (or a smaller cut if the game was profitable enough). And if the game made under $1000, subtract $100 for Steam’s listing fee.

Let’s go through an example. Hollow Knight: Silksong currently has 394,000 reviews. That implies about 12M sales on Steam alone. Each sale is $20, and we’ll assume an average discount of 15%. In total that’s $200M revenue. For such a large game, Steam only takes a 20% cut, leaving the developers with $160M. Now, divide that among three developers over the course of 7 years of development, and the implied annual salary of each dev is $7.7M.

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Bad Puzzles

What is the difference between a puzzle and a real world problem? A puzzle is devised by someone, generally with the intent of making a pleasant experience for the solver. In contrast, a real world problem is not guaranteed to have a solution, not guaranteed to have a feasible path towards a solution, and is not guaranteed to be pleasant to solve.

Here is a simple math puzzle. Can you design two six-sided dice whose sum follows the same probability distribution as 2D6, but with different numbers (all positive integers) on their faces? Classic, totally possible.

Here’s a simple real world physics problem: Can you estimate Earth’s equatorial bulge from its rotation speed and gravity? I thought I could estimate this using geometrical considerations, but that gives the wrong answer. The correct solution must account for the gravitational field of the bulge itself, which can be calculated by decomposing it into spherical harmonics. Nobody wants to do that.

Puzzles do not always succeed at being enjoyable. Sometimes you waste a lot of time on a puzzle, and then when you look up the solution you think, “I was never going to get that one.” For example, one time I picked up a puzzle box on a friend’s shelf, despite my friend’s insistence that the puzzle was stupid. After messing around a bit, he showed me how to open it: he slammed it hard on the table to shake a magnet loose. I was never going to solve that one, because I happen to have reservations about slamming potentially delicate objects that do not belong to me.

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